Advanced Micro Devices since the early 1980s has doggedly stuck to the x86 chip architecture that Intel invented, which powered the original IBM PC and most that followed. On Tuesday, it made good on a pledge to back an additional horse in the computing race.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company used a conference in Silicon Valley to unveil a chip for server systems that is based on technology licensed by ARM Holdings, which has become the mainstay of smartphones and tablets. AMD is one of a number of companies planning to move such chips into servers, on the theory that their low cost and low power consumption can bring big economic benefits.

But AMD struck an unusually bold tone for a company that has been a pretty inconsistent performer in recent years, at least financially.

Andrew Feldman, the AMD executive leading the effort, vowed that the company will be much more than a part of the pack selling ARM chips for servers by 2019.

“We will be the leader,” Feldman said, during the Open Compute Summit event.

Feldman said the new ARM chip will be shipping to customers in sample quantities in the next few weeks. He said it will have eight calculating engines, or processor cores, but disclosed no details about pricing or commercial availability.

Such moves have long been seen as a potential threat to Intel, the dominant provider of server chips. The company scoffs at the notion that server makers would ever switch technologies on a major scale. But Intel has responded by accelerating the development of more energy-efficient server chips, based on the Atom design it developed for portable computers.

To judge by the predictions of chip makers, one would have thought ARM-powered servers would be widely used by now. The first to announce plans for such chips, Applied Micro Circuits, discussed its first such product a year ago at the same event.

Frank Frankovsky, a Facebook executive who chairs the Open Compute Project, admits he may have been over-optimistic about the timing of ARM-powered servers.

“Basically the timeline has just shifted out about six months,” he said in an interview this week. Frankovsky expects such systems to begin appearing in data centers toward the end of this year, with full-scale adoption beginning in 2015.

But Feldman said the momentum will become overwhelming, because of the volume economics and other advantages that ARM enjoys from the technology’s dominance in mobile devices. He predicted that such servers would account for 25% of the server market by 2019.

Feldman predicted that just about every company that buys servers in massive volumes will have ARM-based chips tailored to run their specific computing jobs. These companies will be “involved in meaningful customization,” Feldman said.